Interactive Surfaces

Interactive Surfaces are usually large touch screens either on the walls or floors. With OLED technology on its way these screens will become ubiquitous in a few years. We will stick them everywhere - our hallways and bedrooms... we will scroll them and take them with us. How will we interact with them? What new applications can we create aside from the same old TV or computer screen paradigms. Again, this content will be of great interest in the Marketing industry.

In 2008, the Sheridan IMM students worked with Infusion from Waterloo on Microsoft Surface tables (not laptops) building multitouch apps for Dubai. Many years earlier, Bill Buxton, gave an amazing talk to the students - he then became chief researcher at Microsoft and most likely had a hand in the development of the Surface tables. We took all the students to the event below. IMM students have made blob detection surfaces from shoe boxes and wax paper and tested them with DodoFlash. They have gone into industry and made interactive surfaces for art and marketing installations.

There is also projecting on surfaces and using lasers to detect interaction.